rue Happiness, and down it
goes with every symptom of pleasure. This Ibsen, they say, is dull
past believing, and we yawn and stretch beyond endurance. Pardon! they
interrupt, but this Ibsen is deep and delightful, and we vie with one
another in an excess of entertainment. And when we open the heads of
these two young people, we find, not a straightforward motive on the
surface anywhere; we find, indeed, not a soul so much as an oversoul,
a zeitgeist, a congestion of acquired ideas, a highway's feast of fine,
confused thinking. The girl is resolute to Live Her Own Life, a phrase
you may have heard before, and the man has a pretty perverted ambition
to be a cynical artistic person of the very calmest description. He is
hoping for the awakening of Passion in her, among other things. He knows
Passion ought to awaken, from the text-books he has studied. He knows
she admires his genius, but he is unaware that she does not admire his
head. He is quite a distinguished art critic in London, and he met her
at that celebrated lady novelist's, her stepmother, and here you have
them well embarked upon the Adventure. Both are in the first stage of
repentance, which consists, as you have probably found for yourself, in
setting your teeth hard and saying' "I WILL go on."

Things, you see, have jarred a little, and they ride on their way
together with a certain aloofness of manner that promises ill for
the orthodox development of the Adventure. He perceives he was too
precipitate. But he feels his honour is involved, and meditates the
development of a new attack. And the girl? She is unawakened. Her
motives are bookish, written by a haphazard syndicate of authors,
novelists, and biographers, on her white inexperience. An artificial
oversoul she is, that may presently break down and reveal a human being
beneath it. She is still in that schoolgirl phase when a talkative old
man is more interesting than a tongue-tied young one, and when to be an
eminent mathematician, say, or to edit a daily paper, seems as fine an
ambition as any girl need aspire to. Bechaniel was to have helped her to
attain that in the most expeditious manner, and here he is beside her,
talking enigmatical phrases about passion, looking at her with the
oddest expression, and once, and that was his gravest offence, offering
to kiss her. At any rate he has apologised. She still scarcely realises,
you see, the scrape she has got into.

XVII. THE ENCOUNTER AT MIDHUR